Privacy-Preserving Parametric Inference: A Case for Robust Statistics

Marco Avella-Medina

Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2021, vol. 116, issue 534, 969-983

Abstract: Differential privacy is a cryptographically motivated approach to privacy that has become a very active field of research over the last decade in theoretical computer science and machine learning. In this paradigm, one assumes there is a trusted curator who holds the data of individuals in a database and the goal of privacy is to simultaneously protect individual data while allowing the release of global characteristics of the database. In this setting, we introduce a general framework for parametric inference with differential privacy guarantees. We first obtain differentially private estimators based on bounded influence M-estimators by leveraging their gross-error sensitivity in the calibration of a noise term added to them to ensure privacy. We then show how a similar construction can also be applied to construct differentially private test statistics analogous to the Wald, score, and likelihood ratio tests. We provide statistical guarantees for all our proposals via an asymptotic analysis. An interesting consequence of our results is to further clarify the connection between differential privacy and robust statistics. In particular, we demonstrate that differential privacy is a weaker stability requirement than infinitesimal robustness, and show that robust M-estimators can be easily randomized to guarantee both differential privacy and robustness toward the presence of contaminated data. We illustrate our results both on simulated and real data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01621459.2019.1700130 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jnlasa:v:116:y:2021:i:534:p:969-983

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UASA20

DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2019.1700130

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Statistical Association is currently edited by Xuming He, Jun Liu, Joseph Ibrahim and Alyson Wilson

More articles in Journal of the American Statistical Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().